TestTubeBaby is a lifelong project of Gen-X multi-instrumentalist, performance artist, playwright, composer, counsellor, professor, and non-profit executive director Brian Gross.

He made his debut at age 8 voicing/handing the role of “Princess” in his family’s puppeteering troupe’s production of “The Princess Eater” (spoiler alert: the Princess lives, the Princess Eater dies). Throughout the 1980s and 90s he performed across the Los Angeles Metropolitan area, was the first openly gay high school student body president (probably anywhere, in 1986), charted the carnage of the AIDS crisis, composed for numerous dance companies, and fronted the signed EBM band Apocrypho. The Los Angeles Times said that his 1996 sold-out musical play “successfully treads the fine line between raunchy and tasteless.”

On account of DOMA, in the early 2000s, Gross fled to Canada (via Indonesia) to save his binational relationship. After exiting two decades in 12-step programs in 2010, he became a fixture in British Columbia’s harm reduction and drug user group movements, and an advocate for self-determined, culturally-based programming designed, developed, and delivered by Indigenous youth. Currently, he is a counsellor at BC’s Forensic Psychiatric Hospital.